It seems that men (and when I say men I mean men and women) have a desire to try to make their own names great. We are all so self-consumed with how we look, how we act, how others treat us, if we are getting our fair share…and it’s all selfishness.

We want everyone to know how important we all think we are in our own eyes. This is nowhere more on display to me as I walk the streets of Rome with my wife and our friends Shawn and Michele. We are walking around and looking at the ruins (say that word again, RUINS) of ancient societies.

The arch of Titus, the arch of Constantine, the Roman forum and senate, the house of the vestal virgins, they are all rubble. Every monument people create to display their own greatness crumbles into sand and is then trampled upon by tourists taking pictures to send back to show their friends.

Even the Coliseum, as impressive as it still looks, is a crumbled set of stones (that I cannot believe they let people walk around inside of because it could collapse at any moment).

All we do in our own names crumble, just like coliseum, yet we still continue to think that with us it will be different…trust me, it won’t. This why Jesus told us in John 12:32 that when HE is lifted up He will draw all men to Himself. He was speaking about he type of death He was going to die, but it has greater ramifications as well. We must be those who get our eyes off ourselves and onto Him in order for anything we do to have lasting significance.

John 15:16 reminds us: You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. That is what lasts.